KANDY, Sri Lanka (27 Dec 2005) -- At the opening of a boutique hotel and yoga retreat named Talalla Retreat Center, near a long stretch of white beach, an international crowd of stylish guests sips red wine and snacks on canapés. As evening wears into early morning, conversation shifts effortlessly from comparisons of the latest restaurants in London and Sydney to mutual friends burned out working for big investment banks, to high-end yoga teachers who charge $600 a lesson. One man says he's just returned from his 57th trip to Bali. Just a couple of years ago, this kind of upscale gathering would not have been uncommon in Sri Lanka. After a cease-fire that halted civil war between the ethnic Sinhalese-dominated government and ethnic Tamil insurgents in 2002, the lush, gorgeous island - Sri Lankans compare their country to the Garden of Eden - seemed poised for mass tourism. Vacationers began arriving from abroad; small luxury hotels were opening in towns and along untouched coastlines. "In 2003 and 2004, you couldn't get a hotel room," said Varini de Silva, owner of Ceylon Express International, a California-based Sri Lanka tour operator. But one year ago, about 30,000 Sri Lankans died in the tsunami, villages were devastated and weeks of news coverage showed the island's coast in ruins. "After the cease-fire, there was this buzz here, because it was like a destination opened again - like Sri Lanka had been found," said Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne, who owns a travel company there. "After the tsunami, people focused elsewhere. And now, to say, 'Well, we're open again.' Perhaps you can't get back that same excitement." Or maybe you can. I've come to the Garden of Eden to see the ruins of palaces and shrines of one of the world's first Buddhist kingdoms, the stunning mix of mountain, jungle and beach. I've come wondering how Sri Lanka had been reborn in the past three years, as the brutal civil war seemed near its end and the country was opened to tourism again, revealing new details of its lost ruins and untrammeled beaches. And I've come to discover what happens to the next hot destination after disaster - and whether the tourists will ever be drawn to return. Colombo, Sri Lanka's sprawling capital, had never really caught the buzz. The streets are choked with traffic; in fact, the narrowness of roads across Sri Lanka contributed to my decision to hire a driver and guide, Lalajith Manawadu. But as we drive out of Colombo toward Kandy, the pre-colonial royal capital and center of Buddhist heritage, and the beginning of Sri Lanka's hill country, I begin to understand why the teardrop-shaped island could be mistaken for Eden. The air becomes crisp, and the road climbs through thickly forested hills, past jungles crowded with so many jackfruit and teak trees that the plants create a canopy over the road. Sri Lanka has a long history of preservation - King Devampiya reputedly created a wildlife park more than 2,000 years ago - and an enormous array of animals, plants and terrain for a country the size of Ireland. Six kilometers, or four miles, outside Kandy, at the Peradeniya Botanic Gardens, I stroll past a giant Javanese fig tree covered in roots that look like writhing snakes. In the rain, I take shelter in a greenhouse containing orchids in a bewildering array of colors: red, white, purple, purple with polka dots. Compared with Colombo, Kandy seems like a village. The line to enter Temple of the Tooth, an ancient shrine reputedly containing a tooth of the Buddha, is short, though Lalajith told me that on important festival days, it can stretch for nearly five kilometers. We arrive in time for the morning puja, a ceremony in which men in sarongs and turbans pound drums to welcome offerings. Sri Lanka's colorful festivals, which drew both Sinhalese and Tamils after the 2002 cease-fire, are helping in the island's recovery. In August, when Kandy held the Esala Perahera festival, celebrating the tooth relic, local hotels were unexpectedly packed. The first high-end boutique hotel in the area, the Kandy House, opened only in August. The former manor of a minister to Kandyan kings, the house has been restored. After sleeping in a four-poster canopy bed, I sat on the back veranda, recovering from a swim in the pool. The Kandy House is not so unusual: Sri Lanka features a new crop of stylish luxury hotels that keep it on the international travel map. There is a precedent. Geoffrey Bawa, a Sri Lankan architect who died in 2003, was one of the fathers of Asian modernism, which incorporates local motifs to create buildings that reflect traditional Asian architecture. Today, many high-end hotels are refashioned Bawa creations. Somewhat surprising to me, neither the tsunami nor this autumn's violence in northern Sri Lanka, in which suspected Tamil insurgents killed police officers and other officials, has halted the hotel openings. "Hotel owners in Sri Lanka think we're all sitting on a gold mine," because of the undiscovered scenery and English-speaking work force, said Miguel Cunat of Sri Lanka In Style, a new organization designed to promote luxurious sites and services. Politics seem far away as we climb away from Kandy and into Sri Lanka's traditional tea-growing area, near the town of Nuwara Eliya, in the hill country 80 kilometers from Kandy. Created by British colonists, Nuwara Eliya still has gabled cottages that look as if they were airlifted from Dover. The winding road snakes past waterfalls and terraced plantations of tea and vegetables. Though Kandy and Nuwara Eliya, being inland, were not struck by the tsunami, their tourist industries seem to have suffered from it. The beach areas apparently are drawing foreigners this year who came as part of the tsunami relief effort, fell in love with the coast and are returning for a holiday. As we descend from Nuwara Eliya to the southern coast, the scope of tsunami damage becomes clearer. Like the grim reaper's accountant, Lalajith reads off the number of people who died in each beach town. | | We reach the south coast, where we will drive between the towns of Galle and Tangalle. In contrast to Thailand, where I'd been during the tsunami, and where reconstruction has gone relatively smoothly, here, a year after the disaster, many villagers are still living in blue tents. We pass gutted buildings like Milton's, an old hotel that was demolished, leaving only a line of toilets, like a bizarre Duchamp sculpture. Even the sea turtles who come to the south coast, unflappable survivors, were affected, their egg-laying grounds destroyed. Yet the south coast is also where the pre-tsunami buzz has come back strongest. The south coast tourist infrastructure has been rebuilt, and foreign residents have founded reconstruction projects like AdoptSriLanka, an aid organization started by Geoffrey Dobbs, proprietor of luxury hotels. In Galle, the elite-hotel operator Aman Resorts has turned the 17th-century buildings that made up the New Oriental Hotel into a masterpiece called Amangalla, all high ceilings and deep, rich teak floors; Amangalla plugged on despite opening just before the tsunami. One block away, two Australians have revamped a Dutch merchant's villa into the Galle Fort Hotel, with rooms set around a courtyard pool surrounded by colonnades. The inspiration is catching: Around the corner, an 18th-century mansion has been restored into an even more intimate property, the Fort Printers, a five-room boutique hotel. "A lot of people who want to try high-end boutique establishments still probably haven't been to Sri Lanka," said Karl Steinberg, co-owner of the Galle Fort Hotel. One day, we drive to Mulkirigala, where Buddhists carved shrines out of a steep rock face. Inside the caverns, scenes from the Buddha's past come to life in raw colors. Another morning, we head to Kataluwa, where four artists depicted the hells faced by Buddhists who stray from the path, surreal visions of sinners with axes cleaving their skulls apart. Middays, I head to the ocean. On crescent-shaped Mirissa Beach, south of Galle, the sand resembles fine dust. I share the beach only with men perched above the shallow water on stilts, a traditional Sri Lankan fishing style. In the afternoons, I always wind up inside the old fort in Galle, a Unesco World Heritage Site. First built by the Portuguese, the walled city was expanded by Dutch and British colonists and now is the center of boutique hotels, home to the Amangalla, Galle Fort and Printers. The tsunami spared those inside the 36-hectare, or 90-acre, walled city. Today, Galle is a warren of narrow streets reflecting the cosmopolitan heritage - Marco Polo supposedly landed here, and for centuries the town was a trading capital. Jumbled together are austere Anglican churches painted a blinding white, Dutch merchant houses, Buddhist shrines and pastel Iberian mansions topped with orange terra cotta tiles, which give Galle the feel of an Asian Riviera. Each day I search for curries. Sri Lankan food resembles South Indian, the curries hotter and coconuttier, the ingredients fresher tasting. At Wijaya Beach Cottage, southeast of Galle, I sample simple fare - grilled local seer fish. At the Sun House, a boutique hotel in the former home of a Galle spice merchant, I gorge on a curry feast. I down piles of string hoppers, the Sri Lankan version of dosa, wafer-thin sweet pancakes. Over the hoppers, I spoon mango chutneys, tamarind curries and pol sambol, grated coconut with a touch of lime and dried fish. The day after the party at Talalla, Lalajith and I walk to the beach at Tangalle. To me, Tangalle's beach seemed an idyll - we are alone, the kind of solitude virtually impossible to find in Thailand or the Caribbean. "There's no one here," I mutter in bliss. I glance over at Lalajith. "Yes, no one here," he mutters, frowning. "No one at all." He tosses a rock into the sea and walks back to the car. When to Go Late December and January is high season, with raised prices to match. The hill country tends to be relatively dry from November to late March, with the west and south coasts generally monsoon-free from December to early April. In July or August (the dates vary), the Esala Perahera festival in Kandy brings together acrobats, traditional dancers, drum players and jewel-covered elephants for processions honoring the Buddha's tooth. How to Get There Because the standard of English in Sri Lanka is high, it's relatively easy to arrange trips yourself. And since many of Sri Lanka's boutique hotels are new, tour operators, who generally favor large hotels, may not be familiar with these smaller places. |
